Revisiting Beauty and the Beast (1991) - Rank the songs!

By Lynn Lee

With the live-action remake of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast just around the corner, what better time to revisit the original animated masterpiece and its endlessly hummable songs?  If you saw the movie when it came out in 1991 and happened to be a bookish, musical theater-loving little girl (or boy) at the time, odds are you got the soundtrack and learned it by heart.  (I plead guilty on all counts.) 

While I have no idea what happened to my copy, every beat and lyric – by Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman, respectively – are still firmly etched into my memory.  I never saw the Broadway musical, which restored a song that had been scrapped from the movie (“Human Again”) and added several new songs by Menken and lyricist Tim Rice, but reportedly the new movie isn’t including any of the latter.  Instead it’s adding four newly new songs by Mencken and Rice.  However, fear not, fellow original Disney B&B enthusiasts: it appears that all of the Mencken-Ashman songs from the 1991 movie will be in the mix.  As Cogsworth would say, “If it’s not ba-roque, why fix it?” 

We’ll have to wait to debate the merits of the new songs but we can discuss how the original ones stack up against each other.  With the caveat that this feels a bit like picking one’s favorite kid, here’s my ranking from lowest to highest...

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The Furniture: Stark Contrast in "The Eyes of My Mother"

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. (Click on the images to see them in their more detailed large glory.) Here's Daniel Walber...

The Eyes of My Mother, one of the best horror films of 2016, stands in a grand tradition of scary iconography. Which is, of course, also a polite way of saying that Nicolas Pesce’s debut feature is not much of a departure. Francisca (Kika Magalhães), the film’s murderous anti-heroine, grows up surrounded by anatomical grotesquery and Catholic devotional objects. As is often the case in the genre, she is gradually driven to violence by the meticulously-crafted environment in which she lives.

But what makes The Eyes of My Mother different is the way these otherwise familiar tropes are woven together. The unsettling sets and weird props aren’t simply tossed in for dramatic impact, but arranged to unite the darkness of the setting with the psychology of the protagonist. This is why production designer Sam Hensen so richly deserved his American Independent Film Award last month, winning over some much more colorful and outrageous competition.

The two most prominent design themes are announced out very beginning, each with a single, striking object...

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On this day: Howards End, George MacKay, '46 Oscars

A very happy quarter century to one of the best young actors working George Mackay (Captain Fantastic, Pride) born on this day in 1992. We're concocting a little series on young actors to debut soon (since we spend so much time on actresses, we'll throw a little love the other direction soon). But George's birthday isn't the only thing worth celebrating today,

Other things you can celebrate in today's showbiz history are after the jump... 

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Links: Sharp Objects, French Directors, Emmy Ladies

THR amazing casting news: the great Patricia Clarkson will play Amy Adams estranged mother in HBO's Sharp Objects. Both roles are so juicy. Filming starts soon but we're talking next summer's Emmy nomination's not 2017's. Speaking of...
Decider Joe Reid's already thinking of the Lead Actress in a Miniseries Emmy race: 10 women, only 6 slots
/Film original Ghost in the Shell actors will dub the new film for Japanese relates

 

Salon looks back at memorable Russian villains in movies and on TV
All Things Considered wonders if you can make a King Kong movie without perpetuating racial undertones
Variety winners for the Miami Film Festival: Family Life and Maria (and Everybody Else)
Awards Daily 77 films about women on the way. That sounds like a lot, so, yay!
The Sun a couple of more pictures from the set of Mary Poppins Returns. A polka dot bowtie on Mary!
Decider Girls found the line that HBO wouldnt cross for sex scenes 
/Film Edgar Wright's Baby Driver starring Ansel Elgort premiered at SXSW so here's the trailer 
W Mag classic Linda Evangelista photo. Love.

French Waves, Not New
The New Yorker has an article / theory on why France hasn't produced a great director in three decades. Interesting ideas but I disagree with the thesis. France may never be the critical hotspot in international cinema -- there's always some exciting country of the moment in international cinema and it changes every handful of years -- but they're consistently strong.

Thirty years ago was 1987. Directors who made their first feature films after 1987 include Claire Denis (1988), Arnaud Desplechin (1991), Jacques Audiard (1994). Does The New Yorker really exclude all of them from a list of great French directors? I admit France isn't turning out the greats as consistently as they once did and Brody is right that the new exciting directors dont seem to stay as exciting for as long as they should now (what happened to Christophe Honore, for example?) but let's be reasonable! I personally have high hopes for Celine Sciamma (Girlhood), Deniz Gamze Ergüven (Mustang) and Alice Winocour (Disorder) so maybe the future is female? 

"Complicit"
Did you see SNL's perfume ad of Ivanka Trump starring Scarlett Johansson? The Titanic joke is rich.

Was King Kong a Box Office Monster?

What did you see this weekend?

check out that monster-sized beard on KONG SKULL ISLAND director Jordan Vogt-Roberts!

After catching up on TV shows like Big Little Lies and Feud, I went to Kong: Skull Island with a friend. Afterwards I eagerly read Chris's review, nodding a long at most of it. It's an easy-sit with surprising charm (mostly by way of John C Reilly's ad libbing... he seriously saves the movie from its paint-by-numbers blockbuster strategy) but wow was it disposable. Will anyone remember anything about it in a year's time?

And this to build a whole franchise on? Not too many of my audience members stayed for the stinger after the credits but that it was an enjoyable visual tease of other iconic kaiju like Godzilla, Ghidra, and Mothra. While the film opened at #1 it seems likely that Warner Bros was looking for much bigger numbers to launch a whole franchise on. The last installment of Godzilla, for example, opened to over $90 million.  Perhaps by pairing them in Kong vs Godzilla (due in 2020) they can get closer to $100? Box Office charts for the weekend and some related news items are after the jump...

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